Performative authority and responsibility: 'Wills' and copyright in Richardson, Dickens, and Trollope (Charles Dickens, Samuel Richardson, Anthony Trollope)

This dissertation examines the performative act of the will---particularly the relationships of dependence and power it enacts---to consider how authority is constituted and symbolically articulated in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels. The will functions figuratively as a site of political and linguistic authority through which novelists articulate their authorial rights and critique political and legal philosophies, semantics, and constructions of authorship. Through a complex synecdochical relationship, in which the literary testament and its consequences represent other written texts and their culture of production, representations of the will complicate questions of origin and legitimacy. In so doing, they undermine traditional conceptions of inheritance, paternity, law, performative utterance, and narrative.; My analysis of speech-act theories and political philosophies of property shows how the figure of inheritance addresses political and linguistic concerns, such as individuals' conceptions of power in their political actions and utterances. Rather than supporting absolute notions of power, testamentary narratives critique such potentially violent theories by undercutting traditional conceptions of linear succession with retroactive understandings of inheritance. Additionally, I draw on many legal sources surrounding the contemporaneous copyright debates to emphasize the resonance between the way that wills are represented and debated in the novel and the way copyright issues are formulated. Depictions of inheritance appear in the novels of Richardson, Dickens, and Trollope, who were all deeply invested in copyright debates and the status of authors. Their novels, however, often implicitly critique their political formulations about the author's absolute right to his property. Often, the novels' inverted representations of inheritance undermine the logic of natural right that supports authorial right and thereby suggest that copyright extensions, and the notion of original authorship attached to them, are based on faulty, unethical, rationales. While Richardson's and Dickens's novels undermine their, often unviable, positions on authorial right, Trollope offers a solution to the dynamics of power between testators and heirs, and between authors and the public---a model of authority based on contingency and love. This model offers readers a context through which to interpret the culture of inheritance and the increased privatization of intellectual property that characterizes our society today.